Bruce Sterling's Blog

(((The takeaway here:)))

"Military Ties
"• Military cooperation and arms sales have become a central aspect of Israel-India relations.[28:] 

• In 2009, Israel overtook Russia as India's leading arms supplier, with Israel and India signing more than $1 billion in defense contracts in 2007 and 2008.[29:] 

• India has increasingly turned to Israel for sophisticated weapons systems. The Mumbai terror attack in November 2008 was particularly significant in expediting India's acquisition of air and n...

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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/07/politics/washingtonpost/main5368594.shtml

(…)

"To some authorities, the new laws are essentially licenses to grow money. With a $100 investment in enriched soil and nutrients, almost anyone can cultivate a plant that will produce two pounds of marijuana that can sell for $9,000 in hundreds of medical marijuana clubs or on the street, according to growers.

"High-end marijuana grown under such special conditions often fetches 10 times the price of...

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http://www.guttergeek.com/page184/october2008/motioncomics/motioncomics.html

"The biggest issue of motion comics may be that they're trying to fill a niche that simply doesn't exist."

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*Okay, first, just have a look at THIS:

"Tears of the Black Tiger," a modern Thai cinema effort:

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/11/on_the_pleasures_of_not_belong_1.html

(…"

"Paradoxically, though, genres have had a tighter hold on our imagination in recent years as the range of cultural choice has broadened and audiences have fragmented. Film historian Rick Altman tells us that far from imposing rigid boundaries between genres, the old studio system depended on the idea that the same film could...

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Avatar Machine [LONDON:] 2008 from MARC OWENS on Vimeo.

http://www.marcowens.co.uk/index_frame.htm

"Avatar Machine is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.

"The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment…."

via @_neural

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*American pop music used to be full of white middle-class Anglo kids who had taken some LSD and gotten all "weird." Nowadays we've got pop music by extremely dissociative, utterly globalized networked kids who enjoy backpacking in the Hindu Kush while contemplating Italian Futurism. With ProTools. And they can cook.

http://www.myspace.com/kundalinishockattack

(…)

"Ashvin and Yousuf are both avid cooks as well, the old KSA song "Botch It Up Boccioni" being a culinary reference to the Italian F...

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*Hey wow! Neat surveillance hack!

*Can't wait to see the law and order surge as girlfriends of prominent Tory politicians are marked "of interest." That would sure make great fodder for another anti-Tory "desperate housewives" sex blog.

*In fact, given the fact that "mission creep" in this system is so promising, why not mark ALL Tories "of interest?" Marking peace demonstrators "of interest" is sort of ridiculous, because they don't matter and nobody ever listens to them.

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*I consider myself fairly hip about Italian futurismo, but I never before heard a whisper about a futurist space-travel novel in 1921 involving a genocide on Jupiter.

http://www2.hum.uu.nl/congres/futurisms/abstracts.htm

Kyle M. Hall (Harvard University): Poetics, Politics and 'La fine del mondo': Volt's Futurofascist Apocalypse

"Vincenzo Fani Ciotti, known to history under his Futurist pseudonym 'Volt', strode into Futurism relatively late, publishing his parole-in-libertà collection Archi...

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*ProFORMA: Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition." It's generating 3D models from real objects, live, with just a webcam.

http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~qp202/

Via Fabbaloo.

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*Okay, these Seattle venture-capital guys are blowing smoke, but I like it that they're blowing such specific smoke. It's like they're blowing smoke-rings.

http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/11/predictions_2010_twitter_netflix_and_more_from_the_crystal_ball.html

On the panel were Kelly Smith, founding partner, Curious Office; Greg Gottesman, managing director, Madrona Venture Group; Glenn Kelman, CEO, Redfin; Bill Bryant, venture partner, Draper Fisher Jurvetson; and Andy Sack entrepreneur ...

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